


The Taming of the Shrew

by Nebulous Bounds (RainonyourBack)



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Amputation, Banter, Birth, Canon Divergence, Cruelty, F/M, Violence, prosthetic, spoilers for the End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 05:48:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17115596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainonyourBack/pseuds/Nebulous%20Bounds
Summary: So, he doesn't die.





	The Taming of the Shrew

So, he doesn’t die.

The harpoon gets him in the leg, which, not fun, but survivable, when you have the makings of a cockroach. It has since been scientifically proven to be the case for Count Olaf, by Klaus, repeatedly, so survive he does.

He falls onto the helmet and breaks it, and the spores spread.

Getting Kit Snicket down from her Vaporetto of Favorite Detritus is harder, with only one good leg, so Violet helps, pushes him up and supports him. His bony backside bites into her shoulder where she compensates for the lame leg, and there are yells and sighs and it sounds like he’s just going to fall again, but he doesn’t.

He gets Kit down.

She says the words.

And Olaf opens his mouth, and it looks like he wants to speak, maybe spit out a poem in response. But he isn’t dying, is he? He ate the apple. His leg is mangled but he’ll live. He’ll make do. He’ll skin the books and make himself a bandage from there. So, he doesn’t say anything. It would be stealing from her, from Kit who’s actually dying and refuses the cure because of the baby that has yet to be born.

So, he doesn’t go back to Larkin. He gives her something else, a hand to hold, a squeeze, and he lets her have the entire moment. Very uncharacteristic of him, he thinks, to not hog the drama for himself. She makes him strange. Always has.

He squeezes her hand.

And then he passes out.

* * *

Violet is busy with making someone be born, but she still steals glances. Unconscious he looks old and frail and bloody. He is still bleeding out from that leg, and the amount of blood would be worrying if it were anyone else but Count Olaf. Count Olaf certainly deserves this long, drawn-out demise. A world without Count Olaf is a better world for the baby and for them.

That is certainly how Klaus thinks, and Sunny, too, and she understands them.

And yet, once the baby is born and squirming into Sunny’s lap, once Kit has stopped panting and stopped breathing and just _stopped_ , she turns to him. Perhaps because if she does she doesn’t have to think about another adult dying in front of them, another adult abandoning them and their child. It’s not fair to Kit, she knows, but it’s still there, in her almost-adult mind still so lost amidst the wreckage of their lives.

She looks at their nemesis, and she looks at his wound. His disguise is torn and red now, and she has to push fabric aside to look.

It does not look good.

“What are you doing,” Klaus asks when she starts to prepare for another operation. Her hair is still loosely tied but loosely will not suffice, so she reties it, unaware of perhaps uncaring that she is smudging it with blood. It’s not hers, at any rate.

“I’m sawing his leg off,” she answers, because that is what she means to do. Sunny lets out an appreciative growl and shows off her teeth.

Klaus sees further. “We don’t have time for this and he certainly does not deserve it. The baby needs us. Needs you.”

And he is right. A newborn baby needs all the help they can get, even if all the help only means that of three poor orphans whose knowledge of infant care is only that of siblings, or recent infant experience, and not of doctors.

Violet’s lips turn into a thin line. “I’m sawing his leg off.”

“But why? You don’t have to do this. We owe nothing to him. We can finally be free of him and…”

“If we kill him, we may never know what happened,” she points out.

“He will not tell,” Sunny counters. “Never. This is a game for him.”

And she’s probably right.

“I’m sawing his leg off,” Violet repeats, for the third time. She ate the apple for a reason, did she not? She wants to know. She has to know.

Count Olaf, for all his villainous deeds and crimes, holds the key to too many mysteries for her to let him bleed out. With Kit gone, he’s the last one. Plus, the idea of having him at her mercy for once dances across her mind like wildfire in a dry wood, but she can’t say that.

Klaus and Sunny seem to give up. Perhaps they, too, want to know. Perhaps they just learned to work as a single unit and don’t know how to handle the third point of the triangle breaking off of them. Perhaps they’re too tired to argue.

The baby needs tending to, and so they do, while Violet alone hacks and tears at the mangled leg of Count Olaf. Luckily for him, he does not wake up during.

* * *

He does wake up after, though.

He wakes up with only one leg and what comes out of his mouth is a string of curses so odd and new that Sunny learns a few she can almost admire. She’s also really glad the baby is nowhere around him. No one’s first words should be that depraved when the circumstances allow it. It will come later. It will have to; they will not raise a child unaware of everything around them, not when ignorance cost them so much. But there are ways to tell these things and Olaf makes it even uglier than necessary.

Then he sees her and the fear and pain turn into anger. She doesn’t bother to make sense of the words coming out of his mouth, just watches him launch himself towards her. With only one leg, he doesn’t get very far.

Violet was right on one thing: he is now at their mercy.

Sunny had no desire of such before, but she has to admit the beauty of it all.

“Quiet,” she commands. “Violet be here soon.”

He doesn’t listen, of course. Losing a leg will do that. No matter. It is not Sunny’s business.

Violet was gone and now she returns, holding two makeshift crutches. They are held together by string and willpower; it is likely he will break them soon. She does not want anything sturdy yet, not when he is still screaming at the world and at her in particular.

“What are those,” he demands.

“Crutches,” she answers easily, as if losing a leg was the simplest thing in the world.

“I will not lower myself as to use them,” he shrieks, a bit hysterically, a word that here describes the manner an actor takes when trying to play a character so shocked they cannot keep in character, and not the fake female sickness invented by doctors to explain away humanity. “You will carry me all the way to the bank and…”

“There is no bank on the island,” Violet reminds him. “The only boat just left.”

They wouldn’t have taken him, anyway.

“You did this! You will carry me everywhere!”

She doesn’t dignify that with a response. He shrieks a little more, and she almost pities him, almost. But she remembers the fire, remembers the pain of losing two parents, and she does not.

“You will use those,” she insists. “Or you will crawl, if you want food. Your choice.”

Then she leaves. They eat lunch on their own. When dinner time comes they see him hobble to them with his crutches, and he scowls and he demands food and he’s all himself, but Violet still smiles in triumph.

Klaus and Sunny do not, of course, understand her, but they do not mention it again. They barely have time to think about it. Tending to the baby is more important and occupies all of their thoughts. Violet’s, too; and so the villain is left to grieve for his leg and his ambitions for a while.

* * *

 

Life on the island is rough and the appetite for knowledge takes a backseat, even if it is just as important, or perhaps more important, than regular appetite. Sunny makes tools. Klaus applies his knowledge to gardening and farming. Violet

Count Olaf does nothing, yet. He just complains and yells and grumbles and Klaus is starting to get annoyed, which here is a euphemism for completely fed up. Violet understands.

One day she comes sit beside him, at a safe distance because he’s once tried to take Klaus hostage until someone pointed out that without Klaus they will all die of hunger and that if he doesn’t stop they _will_ tie him up. She is fiddling with wood sticks and rope. At first he makes a point of ignoring her, but he is eternally bored now that he can’t do anything, so he ends up asking:

“Are you finally making a boat? I want it to be named after me.”

“It’s not a boat,” Violet says patiently. “It is a cradle. Or a basket. Carrying the little one everywhere isn’t easy when we are all so busy.”

“You could hand her to me,” he says, and she chortles. A baby is physically fragile, and would be too good a hostage.

“Actually don’t,” he finally says, as if she hadn’t seen through him right away. “I hate babies.”

“You hate everyone,” she nods, still busy with her bending the wood. It’s no good for this kind of work, really, but it’s all she has.

For some time he says nothing. For some time she thinks this is all this is going to be. She has yet to find a way to make him talk or be useful in any way, and she wonders if she should have let him bleed. He would have let her. He would have done more. She remembers the hospital, the haze, his wandering gaze and fingers.

“I didn’t hate Kit,” he ends up saying. Violet pauses. “Your wood is going to snap.”

And it does, because the universe has a very good sense of dramatic timing. She wonders if he meant anything else.

Violet looks at her ruined invention and mentally thinks through adjustments. “If you did not hate her, why not make what I have in mind? I have a million other things that need doing.”

He looks at her in disgust. “An actor’s hands are the tools of his trade! Are you asking me to damage them?”

“I’m asking you to find a way to make yourself useful before we decide to stop feeding your useless ass,” she says, and she doesn’t quite believe she did, because it was always implied and didn’t really need to be stated, but now it is.

Count Olaf sneers, but the disgust and spite in his eye seems to turn to something else. Wariness? Respect? Not yet, surely not. Still, Violet feels somewhat proud.

She expects a ‘you wouldn’t dare’, or something close to that, but nothing comes. Perhaps he knows she would. Perhaps he starts to recognize what he did to them, to her. The edge he’s given her.

“You may survive me yet,” he says, so low she’s not sure she heard it. The intensity of his gaze is suddenly unnerving.

“Whatever,” she says. “I’m going to give you some time to think it through, but be aware that it is running out.”

And then she leaves him with the remains of her failed cradle.

* * *

 Before, she would not have expected him to take the threat seriously, but now she does. And, sure enough, he starts trying.

The first attempts are ridiculous and infuriating. “I know things you could not dream of,” he says one day while she tests a machine that could shell beans and peel potatoes for her. “My knowledge for food.”

“We have books,” she counters evenly.

“Books! Who ever learned anything from those?”

“Klaus did, and he’s keeping us all alive.”

He snorts.

“Knowledge is important,” she admits, “and is the only reason we kept you alive.” It feels like a lie, even if it isn’t. “But that can’t be all you’ll do. Someone needs to help with the farming, or the food making, or _something_.”

“You’d trust me with a scythe?” His grin is mean.

“I don’t think you can hold one and the crutches.” Her remark is casual but she sees how his eyes narrow in anger. It is cruel of her to lean into his disability so casually, she knows. Her parents would not be proud of her.

At least if they really were the people she thought they were, which she isn’t sure about, anymore. Sometimes Klaus reads the diary to them, when night comes. It quiets the baby. It also describes people she can’t really recognize, but she does not know if it’s because they were different with their children or because she has forgotten how they were like. It has been so long.

“The poem,” Violet says again, turning away from the gaping wound in her weary heart. “Kit’s poem. You knew it.”

“It’s nothing special. I’m sure Wonder Bookworm Boy knew it, too.”

“Yes, he did, because he likes books. You have told us at length that you don’t.”

“I contain multitudes,” he spits, and it feels like a shield going up and not just a sword cracking over her head. It is a weak one in either case. She doesn’t feel the need to break it.

* * *

After another week he snaps. The smaller and smaller portions they allow him to appropriate are grating on his nerves, it appears.

“What would you have me do, uh? You won’t trust me with a knife or any cutting equipment, so I can’t cook or farm. You won’t let me approach the baby, so I can’t watch her, or the books, so I can’t read them. There is nothing for me to _do_.”

Violet tilts her head. “What a poor imagination, for an actor.”

He lunges for her then, and she has come just a little too close, so he does get on top of her, and his hands squeeze around her throat. By instinct she rams her knee into his stump and what’s next to it, and he lets go.

Farming and surviving on the island has made her strong. She shoves him away much more easily than she or he ever figured she could, and then she sits up, staring.

“I could have let you die,” she reminds him. “I didn’t have to save your life.”

“Your idea of saving my life is a very specific and narrow-minded one,” he snarls, still curled up in pain.

Violet touches her throat. She wonders if she will be bruised. The others will notice and this time they won’t be so understanding.

“I’m going to make you a leg,” she says quietly, her eyes somehow on him and somewhere else.

He swallows, and perhaps to disguise his surprise mutters: “You did take it away first. It’s only right.”

Violet stops, and turns, and he sees the way she turns her lips into a flat, emotionless line. Is she about to scold him for his ungratefulness? He’d love to see her try.

She doesn’t try.

Instead she shrugs.

“You’ll have to take that off. I need to take measurements.”

And his laugh is shakier than he would like.

* * *

It takes time. She only works on it when she has done everything else that needs doing, and sometimes that means not working on it at all for days at a time. He does not, luckily for him, get impatient. It seems his survival instinct is good enough for that.

What she is making is no joke, either, not just a stick. She has taken measurements by extending her fingers all around his stump, and he was too stricken to even make a crass joke. His body did not betray his mind; small relief. He hates the thought of not being in control, not being the one to spark flames in others and on others, but such is his life now.

When she works on it she comes next to the hut he picked for himself. He claimed the biggest tent for himself; the orphans made their home in the arboretum. They need to be able to reach for each other and the baby, to relax in their warmth and closeness. Olaf’s presence and Violet’s odd behavior do not change that.

Olaf watches her bend and cut and polish what is to become his leg. He has always hated the way her mind moves with clockwork efficiency, the way she can create things like it is nothing. Her work is precise, and it has its rhythm, like the sea. Her speed waxes and wanes in times with her ideas; sometimes he just watches her stare at her work for what feels like hours.

Once the wood snaps and a splinter lodges itself in her hand. She whirls it away, but before she can do anything about it he catches her hand and draws it to him. “Don’t move.”

“What are you…”

She only realizes then how close he is. Now that the leg is mostly assembled, she has started moving around it, sitting around each bit rather than moving it around. Now Count Olaf has her hand and, at this range, the fact that he has only one leg does not matter much. At least the knife is in her other hand, and she can hold it threateningly.

“Move that away,” he snaps. “And stops shifting so much. You’ll make a butcher’s work of it all.”

And then, not sure she believes what she sees, she watches him narrow his eyes at her bleeding finger and cleanly pick the splinter. It’s not gentle work, but he is capable, and his fingers do not move.

Then he lets go of her and she scrambles backward, which gets him laughing, a little.

“Seems that I am still convincing as the big bad wolf, aren’t I?”

She resents the jab, resents the fear coiled in her stomach. He is at their mercy. Has been for almost three months, now. He is no wolf. Barely a wounded dog. At her mercy. The mercy part is important. It is all that matters.

His grin is something else, though, and even if she denies it later she flees the scene.

* * *

“I’ve been reading,” Klaus says. “A lot of the answers we needed are in them. We don’t need the Count.”

“Never did,” Sunny says, as she rocks the baby back and forth. The baby has a name now. The baby has a cradle, too, made out of a birdcage with some of the bars sawn off and filled with blankets. Violet has tied fabric to it; they can carry her around. They all do; Violet never brings her too close to their prisoner, though.

“Not everything is in these books,” Violet counters, because Klaus has been reading to them, and they all know that books are the starting point of knowledge, no less, but no more. “They won’t tell us who killed our parents.”

“We know who did that.”

“He said he didn’t.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t know.” Violet has grown better at admitting it to herself. “I’m just not sure who else we can ask.”

“Has he told you anything? Anything at all?”

Her eyes narrow, but she says nothing.

“This island has everything, but our survival is still fragile,” she says instead. “If one of us falls ill…”

“You think he will help?” Klaus laughs, disbelieving; Violet cannot blame him. She never can.

“So, what do you propose,” she says instead. “We leave him to starve?”

They have done bad things. He has forced them to do bad things. But this would be different, somehow, and Klaus does not answer, and Sunny sighs, and the baby wails, because the world is big and hard and complicated and babies are not equipped to deal with it.

“I will walk her a bit.” Violet grabs her cradle. “Don’t wait on me. I still have to look at the machines in Klaus’s field.”

She walks with the baby against her stomach, still wailing. Sometimes singing helps baby Beatrice; not today. Sometimes walking does; not today.

As she passes the tents, she sees Count Olaf peeking through the door. It is the first time he sees the baby, although ‘see’ is here the wrong word; he sees the cradle, crammed to the brim with warm fabric and love, and he hears the wail.

His gaze stops Violet in her place, though she wishes she could just keep walking. He does not deserve a second look at the child. He is horrible with children. There is no way he can or will help quiet baby Beatrice, and even less so when he discovers her name.

It seems like bad omen, for him to know her name. Like handing her whole to a dangerous fey.

Violet almost starts walking.

“I am horrible with children,” he says, and for some reason she stops. “Can’t you stop her?”

Not _Stop this nonsense immediately_. Not _Shut her up or I’ll eat her for dinner_. Not a threat. Not a demand.

Violet isn’t sure what to make of it.

After a time she starts to walk over, ignoring his grimace as he hears more and more of the power of tiny Beatrice’s tiny lungs.

She sits near the entrance of his tent. She has him in her field of vision, but for some reason she is pretty sure he will not harm the baby. Though he grimaces, though he recoils, he looks at her. His eyes are hungry as they rake over the bundle of covers and limbs. Does he remember who birthed her?

“I can hear her sometimes,” he admits. She’s not sure he means the baby or Kit.

The silence that follows, if you can call silence the sound of a baby still crying as loudly as it can, makes her uneasy. “Babies cry a lot. The world is very frightening to them.”

“I figure you’d know, by now,” Olaf rasps. “The world is very frightening for all sane people.”

“So babies are the sanest of us all?”

She thinks she’s cornered him, and a wry smile covers her face. Instead, while his bony hand rests above baby Beatrice’s face and somehow calms her down, he says:

“Why do you think I hate them?”

**Author's Note:**

> This was a gift created as part of asecret santa exchange. I don't know my giftee very well yet, but their prompts and ideas always strike me as interesting and challenging both. I can't wait to know you better! 
> 
> I have almost stopped writing for anything but Shaman King, so this was a nice challenge. It made me explore stylistic and plot lands that I don’t usually go to, which was very fun.
> 
> I actually haven’t read the book in years but I made do and hopefully it worked for you if you read this far. Comments and criticism are very welcome. Thank you for your time!


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